Stop Showcasing, Start Demonstrating: Rethinking Trade Show Booths

[00:02:00] How FastenMaster chooses which trade shows to attend and which to skip

[00:05:00] Why leading with new products changed the way pros engage at shows

[00:08:00] Designing booth displays around solutions instead of individual SKUs

[00:09:30] Staffing the booth with engineers and product developers instead of salespeople

[00:14:00] Why putting the drill in a contractor's hand beats any display or video

[00:20:00] Booth design psychology: eyeline, open concepts, and avoiding common layout mistakes

[00:27:30] Marketing the show beyond the show floor through social, livestreams, and follow-up

Shaun Jennings is the Senior Marketing Communications Manager at FastenMaster, part of the OMG family of companies. He has spent nearly a decade at FastenMaster, where he oversees trade show strategy, product launch marketing, and brand presence across national and regional events. FastenMaster is an American manufacturer focused on innovative fastening solutions for pro contractors, from deck screws and structural fasteners to coatings and clip systems.

Shaun brings a hands-on, experience-first philosophy to trade show marketing. His approach centers on creating real interactions between pros and products rather than relying on passive displays or scripted sales pitches.

Shaun's answer to how manufacturers should pick their trade shows is straightforward: go where your customers go. Not where your competitors are, and not where FOMO tells you to be.

For FastenMaster, that means a show like JLC Live is a no-brainer because their core audience, the pro contractor, puts down their tools and drives to that event. A show that skews more toward executives in suits might warrant sending a key accounts team, but it does not need a full-scale booth with product demos.

Shaun recommends walking a show before committing to exhibit. Go the year before, observe the audience, and understand the experience. He has done this and walked away knowing certain shows were not a fit. That kind of discipline saves budget and keeps the team focused on the events that matter.

FastenMaster runs two to three major national shows per year for big product launches and full team attendance. Then they layer in around 15 regional or local events run by local reps who know the customers, the yards, and the pros in those areas. That mix, national to hyperlocal, is what Shaun calls the magic.

One of the biggest shifts Shaun has seen over the past several years is how aggressively pros now ask about new products. Before COVID, that question came up, but it was not the default. Now it is the first thing people say when they walk into a booth.

He attributes part of this to a generational shift. The industry has gotten younger. Newer pros did not pay to fly across the country, book a hotel, and sit in traffic just to see products they already know about. They can do that from home. They come to shows for what is new.

FastenMaster had eight product launches on the roadmap this year alone, which Shaun says is not unusual. At IBS, they put their new Zip Clip system right at the front of the booth. Not tucked in the back. Not mixed in with everything else. It was the first thing attendees saw, and it was the thing that stopped people in their tracks.

Shaun's advice for manufacturers without a packed launch calendar is blunt: find a way to make something feel new. Change the packaging, refresh the positioning, or highlight a feature that has not gotten attention. If a booth does not offer something attendees have not seen before, they will walk to the one that does.

With a company that launches as many products as FastenMaster does, fitting everything into a booth could quickly become overwhelming. Shaun's solution is to stop thinking in terms of individual product displays and start thinking in terms of problems.

When FastenMaster introduced their ground contact coating alongside their existing deck frame coating, Shaun did not create two separate setups. Instead, he built a single painting station with brushes and wood where attendees could apply both coatings and see how they worked. One hardworking display covered an entire product category.

The same logic applies to their deck screws. Rather than building a display for each individual fastener, the team builds an actual deck section and puts the screws on it. The starting point is the problem being solved, building a deck, and the products follow from there.

Beth connects this to a broader industry challenge. Many manufacturers struggle with the sheer volume of SKUs they carry, and that overwhelm shows up in booths where everything is on display and nothing stands out. Restraint gives you more control over the conversation and a clearer story to tell in follow-up.

Shaun is direct about this: at FastenMaster's major national shows, he sends very few salespeople. That is not a knock on the sales team. It is a strategic choice.

Instead, he fills the booth with new product development engineers and technical team members. These are the people who literally built the products. They can answer detailed questions, they love construction, and they get genuinely excited talking to pros. That enthusiasm holds up from the first conversation of the day to the hundredth.

Hospitality is the top priority. Shaun tells his team that the people walking the show floor came to talk to them, so booth staff should be approachable, engaged, and never huddled together in conversation while attendees walk by. He calls it out immediately when he sees it.

At IBS this year, FastenMaster also brought in a contractor, Ben Weaver of Orion Deck out of New York, as a booth team member. Ben had built more Zip Decks during the development process than anyone, and when a pro wanted to know what it was really like to build with the product, Ben could speak from firsthand experience. Shaun encourages other manufacturers to think beyond their own employees when building a booth team. Ambassadors and end users can connect with customers in ways that internal staff sometimes cannot.

The sales reps play a critical role too, just not on the show floor at national events. Shaun wants the leads captured at the show to flow to local reps afterward. The goal is for a pro to leave the booth knowing the product, and then get a call from the FastenMaster rep in their territory who can build the ongoing relationship.

This is the core of Shaun's trade show philosophy. FastenMaster's products may look like another screw in a photo, but the difference is in how they perform. The only way to communicate that is to let pros use them.

At IBS, the FastenMaster booth had drills, wood, paint brushes, and coatings. Attendees were driving screws, painting coatings, and physically interacting with products. Shaun says he burns through more drills than he can count because they run them so hard at shows. But it works. He has watched pros hesitate, drive a screw, and then immediately ask to do it again because they could feel the difference.

He points to another booth at IBS as a great example of this principle. A company making handmade gas lamps had a craftsman in the booth literally bending brass and assembling lamps in front of attendees. You could not try it yourself, but you could see the craftsmanship in real time. Shaun says that experience completely changed his perception of the product. He would have assumed the lamps were factory-made without it.

Beth reinforces this with data from Venveo's customer research. The number one reason contractors go into a store instead of shopping online is the look and feel of the product. Trade shows serve the same function at a larger scale. If a manufacturer is not offering that hands-on experience at their booth, they are actually at a disadvantage compared to what a customer could learn online or in store.

Shaun approaches booth design from the perspective of the person walking up after seeing a hundred other booths that day. Early in his career, he used to build popsicle stick scale models of his booth, complete with a small figure to understand the human perspective. He now does this digitally, but the thinking is the same: you have to understand what the experience feels like at ground level.

Eyeline is the biggest factor. What do people see when they walk up? What is at eye level, what is below it, and what is above it? Televisions are effective at grabbing attention because people will stop and watch a screen almost out of habit, even if the content has nothing to do with their category. That pause creates an opening for a conversation.

Shaun prefers open booth concepts. He wants attendees to be able to see from one end of the booth to the other, which lets them spot products they were not expecting and gives the booth an inviting, approachable feel. Big walls and forced entry paths can limit visibility and make people feel like they need permission to enter.

He also treats the aisle as free real estate. FastenMaster places its demos along the outer perimeter of the booth so attendees can stop and watch from the aisle without crossing the carpet line. That casual engagement often turns into a deeper conversation and an invitation to come inside the booth.

Beth and Shaun both point to a specific example from IBS: a major decking manufacturer with a beautiful booth that had no vertical signage at eye level. The deck itself was gorgeous, but unless you looked down, you walked right past it. And neither Beth nor Shaun could identify the company, which says everything about the cost of missing the eyeline.

Shaun's marketing hot take is that only a fraction of your customers are at any given show. Even the best booth with the friendliest staff and the best products is only reaching the people who made the trip. The show itself is an asset you have paid a lot of money for, and most manufacturers do not use it enough.

At IBS this year, FastenMaster ran a livestream from the booth for the first time. They unveiled a new product live, promoted the stream to their wholesale team, dealers, and customers, and had a large audience watching in real time. Beyond the livestream, the team posted constantly from the booth on social media, sent emails before and after the show, and created content specifically designed to make people who were not there feel the energy of the event.

His analogy is simple: investing in a trade show booth without marketing it beyond the floor is like buying a celebrity endorsement and putting it on one billboard. The show generates content, stories, and excitement that should extend far beyond the three days you are there.

You can follow FastenMaster on Instagram and YouTube at @FastenMasterPro to see content from their latest shows and upcoming product launches. You can also visit fastenmaster.com for more on their full product line.

The Smarter Building Materials Marketing podcast helps sales and marketing professionals find better ways to grow leads, sales and outperform the competition. It gives insights, examples and shares stories about how to create a results-driven digital marketing strategy for building products and construction companies of any size. SBMM is co-hosted by Venveo's Founder, Zach Williams and Venveo's CEO, Beth PopNikolov.

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